Kevin's Week In Media

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 01 November 2009 10:48

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-Ray of the Week
Whatever Works
directed by Woody Allen
starring Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson
(Sony)
Allen’s latest, with Larry David as his misanthropic surrogate, is one of the Woodman’s less ambitious movies, like his "short story" pictures -- The Purple Rose of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose, Alice, and Mighty Aphrodite. This is a breezy take on a hypochondriacal lover of New York and young women who doesn’t appreciate friends and girlfriends, but has a redeeming sentimental streak. As uncomfortable an actor as David is, at least the movie is propelled by two wonderful actresses: Evan Rachel Wood as southern dumb-belle Melodie and Patricia Clarkson as her straitlaced mother Marietta.

Of course, it's sappily good-natured, but skewering one-liners that Woody puts in David’s mouth compensate, as does the lovely cinematography by Harris Savides, which makes the streets of New York glisten with romantic fantasies. Even though there are no bonus features—par for the course on all Woody Allen DVDs or Blu-rays—Whatever Works looks so ravishing in hi-def that I can’t wait until such classics as Manhattan, Zelig and Crimes and Misdemeanors finally find their way to the new format.

DVD of the Week
On the Road with Charles Kuralt
(Acorn Media)
For two decades from 1967-1987, newsman Charles Kuralt crisscrossed the country in a mobile home (actually, six of them by the time he was done) to record his impressions of everyday life in these United States. Kuralt’s On the RoadCBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, began as a segment on the then was spun off into a series of its own.

As this DVD set shows, Kuralt’s humane and humble vignettes of people who in other hands would be considered eccentrics at best and oddballs at worst are slices of Americana worth watching over and over. Each of the 18 episodes comprise several reports on ordinary citizens such as: the men who built the Golden Gate Bridge; a super shoe salesman; a man who uses his junk mail as kindling to heat his house year-round;  a family that owns a ginger-ale business. Kuralt also has time for short detours like showing a collection of rural mailbox posts made with everything from horseshoes to old farm plows, which celebrate America as it is, with no condescension of preconceptions. I look forward to future On the Road releases soon.

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